KEY POINTS:
Greg Dulli was out driving in Los Angeles when Flashback by Fat Freddy's Drop came on the radio.
He loved it.
"But they didn't say who it was, so I called the station, which I hadn't done since I was 15," says the former Afghan Whig frontman and leader of the Twilight Singers.
That day he went to the record shop and bought Fat Freddy's Based On a True Story.
"I loved the guy's voice, I thought the words were phenomenal, and a good song is a good song," he says in his well-worn rasp.
In fact he loved Flashback so much, especially the lyric "something mystic in that soul connection", that the Twilight Singers cover it on their new EP, A Stitch In Time.
There's always been a soul and, more specifically, a 60s R&B element to Dulli's rock'n'roll - even in the Afghan Whigs, a band he formed in 1986 that gained cult status during the heyday of grunge and alternative rock.
That "soul connection" comes through even more in the Twilight Singers, who play at the Studio in Auckland on January 11.
Joining the band will be Mark Lanegan, former Screaming Trees frontman and sometime Queens of the Stone Age member who has a voice as ragged as Dulli's.
"It was the first music I heard," says Dulli of the influence of artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Al Green. "My mum was 17 when I was born so she was a teenage girl in the 60s and R&B was her favourite sort of music.
"It wasn't until I got to school that I heard hard rock and stuff like the Stones. But the first thing I heard was R&B and there's a comfort to those songs and a deep degree of familiarity. I was hearing them even before I knew what music was."
That soul inflection is also a reason why the Afghan Whigs were critically acclaimed for albums like 1991's Congregation but failed to gain mainstream success. Many people just didn't get it, Dulli says.
He laughs when he recalls a seminar for new music, held in 1993. One panel discussion was based on a dilemma: how do you market the Afghan Whigs?
"Part of me was like, 'Oh no', and the other part was, 'Hell, yeah'," he says.
"So the blessing and curse of the Afghan Whigs was that we didn't sound like anybody else. We were defiantly unique whereas a lot of people need a label to jump on.
"But since I was 22 I have been able to do what I want, with whoever I want and when I want, and in that respect I am the most successful person I know."
The Whigs spilt in 2001 but the Twilight Singers came about in 1997 when Dulli formed a collective of musicians to record the concept album Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers. However, the final version of this album - eventually recorded with downbeat producers Fila Brazillia - wasn't released until 2000.
"It was a reaction to being in the Afghan Whigs. At that time I was in that confined atmosphere of being in a group that I'd been in since I was 20 and I was looking to try different things with different people."
In a manner typical of Dulli - a renowned ladies' man - he likens the conception of the Twilight Singers to marrying young and "then wondering what it's like to be with another person".
"I think it was an extramarital affair that blossomed into a polygamist lifestyle."
Blackberry Belle followed in 2003 and She Loves You a year later, and last year he released the epic and smouldering Powder Burns, an album about his drug addiction.
But don't expect any sob stories from Dulli. He's clean now - of class A drugs at least, he says. "I still drink a little and I'm no choirboy, but as far as any kind of narcotic goes I can never do that again. But I wrote some great songs when I was [expletive] up, and I've written some great songs completely clean - so ultimately my creativity is my own and it lies within me no matter what state I find myself in."
The line, "I'm alive it kinda took me by surprise", from There's Been An Accident, sums up his previously reckless lifestyle.
"I've had some scrapes with death along the way so I think that's probably where that line came from. It's a look back, probably not unlike when somebody reaches the summit of Everest. "But I literally had reached the fork in the road where left was death and right was life and I took the right."
Who: Greg Dulli, former Afghan Whig and now Twilight Singers frontman.
Albums: As the Afghan Whigs, Congregation (1991); Gentlemen (1993); 1965 (1998). As the Twilight Singers, Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers (2000); Blackberry Belle (2003); She Loves You (2004); Powder Burns (2006).
Latest: A Stitch In Time EP, featuring a cover of Flashback by Fat Freddy's Drop.
Where & when: The Studio, Auckland, January 11.
